


the king of all happiness

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub, Alternate Universe - Quasi-Troll Regency, Other, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Troll Cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 00:44:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Done on a prompt: "write arranged pale marriage cannibals." Then it went sideways into pseudo-Regency and now I don't know who's driving the car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the king of all happiness

The traditional wedding dish of a pale marriage was the corpse of a grub aged seven to ten perigees slathered in congealed blood and marinated in vinegar and spices, then pressure cooked for up to thirty-six hours. But as far as arranged marriages went, this one was a shotgun affair, and they did not even have two days to tie the grub's larynx into a knot. 

After the legislacerator stuck her sword between the Marquise's shoulder blades, dividing flesh as mercilessly as a snake snapping its jaws around a baby's neck (though, one imagines, messier and with less crying from the lusus. Unless the snake in question was venomous. These thoughts occupied Kanaya's mind more insistently than she hoped) Kanaya plotted how to either cleave Terezi's head from her neck or poison her, though she did so more out of observation of etiquette than genuine emotion. She did not care one bit about the proper observation of pale mourning. She had been a poor moirail, and now that Vriska was nothing more than eight gaudy statues, some commissioned before her death and some after her death as per her will, she felt more fondness towards her old friend than she had in life. It was the statues that made her once again kind, with their blank faces and shining surfaces, though it was more like a leak from her affection gland than true friendliness. She could dip a towel in it and all the fondness would dry up. But for the sake of what she once had, she jiggled her way through the motions: jokes about decapitations, threats of poison, one or two mustard bombs accidentally mailed to the legislacerator's office and personal home, which Terezi shared with Karkat. 

All in good fun, she thought then, though it was annoying how Terezi stoically bore her practical jokes without the equally traditional response of assassins or postcards laced with contact poisons. Experimental escalations (severed heads placed in Terezi's mailbox; severed arms dangling from her gates; stuffing her recuperacoon with eyeballs) were met with nothing but irritating silence and a warning from the troll government: she needed to remarry before her body count got any higher--they were _zombie_ heads, she tried to write back, and received a 'well, fuck you' letter in reply. Two quivers of Karkat's lips later, she was engaged to Terezi. Now she was planning for her wedding. 

Kanaya peered at the sheet of grub lists from the caterer. "I prefer my grubs farm-raised," she said. Farm-raised were squishier and came in more exciting colors. Also, the only ones on the sheet had either been baking in the sun for the last week, or died from space diseases. 

"Well, tough luck," Karkat said. "This is what you get." He ran his finger, blunt with dirt encrusted beneath the nails, down the list. "I like that one," he said. "Doesn't look like anyone we know." 

"Hmm," Kanaya said, displeased. "Died of hepatitis." 

"This one."

"Necrotic." She went down the list. "Too expensive. I dislike brown. Missing brains." 

"Damn it, Kanaya," Karkat said, throwing the list down. "Do you even want to be married?"

She'd get a new hive. She had always wanted to see the trees. But when she thought about tenderly cradling Terezi in the brightening dawn, she felt queasy. It would have been easier if they were not so closely related. Terezi was her dead moirail's hate-flush-crush, and her best friend's matesprit, and sprang regular hate boners for her best friend's moirail, and had probably once acted as an auspistice for Kanaya's lusus. The thought of tangling herself further with Terezi made Kanaya want to spit. 

She was burned out on moirallegiance, its demands and its tenderness. Every troll should be granted a broad swath of callousness, unfettered by obligations to be kind to anyone. Why, just as she was escaping sweeps of marriage to the Marquise, was she now to be bound to the Marquise's sister? Imminent culling was not reason enough for her. 

"I'm so tired of you assholes turning into blood geysers every time I turn my back. I look one way and look, Vriska's blown Aradia up. Then I look the other way and Sollux is bleeding on a pile of rocks, and Aradia's dead again, only she's doing her dead-alive whack-a-mole crap! I'm tired of everyone getting getting on the stranger danger culling lists! I'm tired of everything. I just want everyone to sit down at this fucking wedding, shake hands, eat food, and get along. What's so wrong with that? You'll even get to design the clothes for everyone. What's wrong with any of that?"

He stopped walking. He bent down to pick up the sheet, brushed off dirt; useless, she thought, given the state his hands were in. Chapped fingers, knuckles so dry that the skin cracked like a dried riverbed, dirt not only flattened out beneath his fingernails but caught on his sleeve, and a splotch of dried blood that needed a bleaching three wash cycles ago. 

"Please," he said. "Why won't you do it to make me happy?"

How similar those words were to the words in all those books and plays! Please stop me from losing myself, those characters said, or, Please don't let me turn into a berserk machine. Or, in Vriska's words, Well, if you were there wh8n I need8d you to 8e there instead of l8tting me k8ll all those pe8ple--! 

She said to him, nearly the same words as she wanted to say to Vriska for nearly two sweeps, "You're not my moirail or my betrothed." And, looking away so she would not have to see him cry, she said, "So why should I make you happy?" 

"Damn it, Kanaya," he said. "Fuck you. I'm your friend. I'm already married--"

She turned around then, furious. His back was to hers, his shoulders seized up high. She clasped his shoulder and spun him around. "Give me your hands."

"Don't, don't," he said--but she was stronger than him and far taller. She pushed him backwards, made him trip over the rug, kept him off-balance, until his back was against the wall. She seized his wrists and brought them above his head. She stuck her own nail beneath his and worked the dirt out beneath his left hand. Then she spat on the pads of her thumb and middle finger, and rubbed his near-bleeding knuckles, the dusty webs between one finger and another. 

She took his hands by the wrist and brought them down, so he could see them, one hand clean and smooth, the other worn and sore. "Look at this," she said, shaking his right hand so it flopped at the wrist. "Does that clown make you happy? What could make you happy if you are content with him? Would I have to neglect you or commit a murder of someone we know--and why do you only want people with strange oral habits?" Should she take up blood drinking? Smoke sopor? What is it about him that makes him a masochist? She let go, unsure why she was angry; why it felt like something was crawling up her food tube, determined and cruel.

"What could I have done?" she said. 

"Oh, god!" he said. "Goddamn it." He bent down to pick up the grub list again. He was not crying just yet, but he was sniffling in the way that indicated he'd probably storm off into another room and cry there instead. Alone, of course, always alone. Vriska made a joke of it once, because of how uncomfortable she felt when he shouted and cried at the same time; Kanaya laughed with her then, and the two of them were the only ones who had, though Kanaya was certain Sollux would have, if it wouldn't have bumped the headcount to three. She raised her hand to his cheek.

"You tell me," he said. "Tell me. Yellow or green?" 


End file.
